Ring Sculptors

Genre: Visual Novel

Players: 1

.

Review:

Ring Sculptors is a Visual Novel released in 2024 on Nintendo Switch. This game puts players in the role of someone who had a fatal accident and has been reconstructed and revived by the titular Ring Sculptors, a race of cyborgs charged with crafting planetary rings… for some reason. Anyway, the leader of this group has returned you to the land of the living because his men have gone missing at a remote outpost, and he can’t trust those working for him. So rather than hiring a mercenary or private investigator, he’s revived a random stranger from the dead and blackmailed him into a task he might not be well-suited for…

Yeah, this story doesn’t make any sense. The titular ring sculptors don’t make sense, their use for you doesn’t make sense, and while the writing in this game is usually decent, it occasionally dips into the nonsensical or poorly-explained. For a genre where story is of utmost importance, it’s pretty damning that I found myself quickly disinterested in this game’s story.

However, beyond the story, Ring Sculptors also tries to work in an RPG element as players will select a character with stats that will go up or down based on events that happen during the story, and the game will occasionally make dice rolls against these stats to determine success or failure. These stats are Body (indicating your physical strength and athleticism), Mind (intelligence and knowledge), Ego (how well you can work with computers and manipulate other people), and Oxygen (your remaining oxygen supply when using a space suit in a non-oxygenated environment).

Unfortunately, there are a lot of problems here. These roll checks happen frequently, and usually have nothing to do with choices you’ve made through the course of the story. Right from the start, you get multiple roll checks early on that can have an affect on the story, and even choosing a character with a high stat in the category in question is no guarantee of success.

This sort of randomness may work in a game where players have a lot of alternative options, or different ways of accomplishing a task, but here your choices are few, and the consequences of failure are dire. Death may well be a roll check away, a roll you didn’t choose to take and lose even if your stat in that category is high. To say that being railroaded into such a situation and powerless to do anything about it is infuriating is an understatement. To then be forced to start over from the beginning is just adding insult to injury.

Even worse is the oxygen meter, which seems to drop randomly when you’re in a non-oxygen environment. The game acts like you can choose how long to perform a task, which in turn affects the amount of oxygen used, except I was never given such a choice and the game just seemed to pick random numbers for me. In my search of the base in question, I managed to look at two rooms before I had to high-tail it back to the ship or suffocate. I wasn’t given the option to refill my oxygen, either – the ship returned me back to the Ring Sculptors, where I was promptly forced to make a roll check, lost, and died.

I suppose at least the presentation isn’t horrible, with an atmospheric subdued minimalist soundtrack and detailed and at times almost photographic images for characters… but it seems pretty clear that these images were created with an AI algorithm, which not only means I can’t give this game’s creators too much credit here, but the images often don’t reflect the scenes being described in the text.

I feel like the core premise of Ring Sculptors had a lot of potential. A gritty futuristic Visual Novel with RPG elements? That sounds fantastic! But this game fails just about everywhere it can, by using the random elements to remove player choice and railroad them into being forced to restart, by having a story that’s ill-conceived, and by having a dwindling oxygen supply that seems to disappear at random. With all these problems, I cannot recommend this game to anyone.

tl;dr – Ring Sculptors is a Visual Novel with RPG elements in a futuristic setting where players take the role of a man revived from death to investigate a problem for the titular Ring Sculptors. This game’s story is nonsensical, and the RPG-like elements are extremely poorly handled, resulting in extreme frustration and a terrible lack of agency. This game squanders any potential its premise has, and I absolutely cannot recommend it.

Grade: D-

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Francis Obst, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Jared Wark, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}